John Conyers: “more than 200 black farmers in Tennessee stormed the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and occupied the agency's…”

“more than 200 black farmers in Tennessee stormed the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and occupied the agency's offices last week for six long days to protest the mistreatment they've suffered at the hands of USDA county officials. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman has reportedly agreed to meet with the farmers this Friday, July 12th, to address their grievances. In my opinion, something had better come out of this meeting to address the wrongs these farmers have suffered for so long. We thought we had settled this problem in 1999 when the black farmers signed a race discrimination settlement with the Department of Agriculture. That law suit, Pigford v. Glickman, charged that the Department had wrongly denied black farmers loans, crop subsidies and other farm program benefits because of discrimination. The Department was so indifferent to its responsibility to guard against discrimination that it had no procedural mechanism in place to deal with discrimination complaints; indeed, it had disbanded its Office of Civil Rights years earlier, in 1983. The settlement was supposed to address a variety of past racial injustices. It was supposed to pay $50,000 each to any black farmer who had suffered discrimination. It was also supposed to forgive those debts the Department of Agriculture had unfairly assessed against black farmers from 1983 to 1999. Incidentally, the sum of $50,000 payments and forgiven debt was estimated to be about $2.2 Billion.”